by Tamara Avner
“So he never even made it to the Sinai?”
“As far as I know, he went down there and was called back after a few days”.
“So how did he…?”
He reached into the pocket of his pants with their ridiculous darts and took out a crumpled piece of paper. It had no more than three lines scribbled on it. The small, uneven handwriting was skewed downwards and suddenly grew and reached upwards, the last line covering almost the entire sheet.
At that very moment, I should have given him his piece of paper back, grabbed my bag, gone home and never asked another question again. I should have gone home, bowed twice at the foot of the shrine, headed to my room, taken the bullet and the cassette, taken the box down from the attic, buried them all deep in my mother’s closet and gone back to studying for my history and math exams, my two strong suits, by the way. But there’s no helping it. Sometime fate just has it out for us. There’s no helping it. Sometimes, it’s just like a Greek tragedy, your screwed up character takes you down a predetermined path and your will is anything but free. There’s no helping it. Sometimes the scratches are stronger than the tree. The rings say more than roots, trunk, branches and leaves combined. There’s no helping it.
“But I don’t get any of this”.
I grabbed Aner by his lapel and showed him the words written on the page.
“Does any of this make sense to you?”
Aner shrugged his shoulders.
“What on earth does ‘the Vengeful Jews’ mean?” I asked, pointing at one of the lines written in Zvika’s condensed, uneven handwriting.
Aner slumped down on the bench.
“I don’t know for sure. From what I gathered, he went through some terrible trauma and then died of his injuries”.
In the park’s playground, the swings and the carousel rushed up to me and backed away with dizzying speed.
I was all of fifteen. That was the most confusing and paradoxical moment of my life.
“But when did he die? I thought he died right when the war started, not long after they…”
Aner shrugged his shoulders and snuffled.
“It was wartime. Everyone was panicking. What, you think they stopped to check how and when each and every soldier kicked the bucket? They buried him and that was that. And you should be thankful that it ended the way it did”.
“Listen, you’re even more retarded than I gave you credit for. What do you mean ‘be thankful’? Can’t you see something terrible happened to him? Can’t you hear his words just crying out to high heaven? Don’t you see, this was a cover-up! And you have the nerve to say that you loved him like a brother!? And stop shrugging like that or I’ll rip those faggy shoulder-pads right out of your jacket, capish?”
That was the last time I saw Aner. Some twenty odd years later he reappeared in my life, but as far as I knew then, he was gone like a mongoose at sundown and I was left with my worthless English letters, that I suppose he realized were a chip not off Zvika’s old block, but somebody else’s block altogether. And if that wasn’t enough as it is, I was left there hanging with my stupid bother’s stupid death, knowing that a new era had begun this very instant, that things will never go back to being what they were, that a new world –frightening, dark and intricate – was born. Someone has been hiding something terrible, something that ended up at my doorstep simply because I was the only one brave, intrepid and sincere enough to figure it out. And that would be my calling from now on – finding out the truth. I slowly made my way home, dragging my feet on the sunken and crooked pavement of the streets of Ramat-Gan, feeling for the first time what it’s like to have some hidden seam in my inner lining unravel.
Remember me telling that sometimes being reflected in Oded’s eyes turned me into a precious gem?
Once in a million light years, on the rare occasion of a lunar eclipse in Oded Stenger’s psyche, if one was lucky enough to be around just then, equipped with the proper instruments, well calibrated and sensitive enough to catch this rare celestial occurrence, one was granted the singular privilege of peering into the mysteries of the intricate and oh-so-un-banal human laboratory known as Oded Stenger. You must have guessed by now that the makeup of his personality was unlike anyone else’s – just as mine was nothing like any other mold I ever met. That’s what made us soul-mates. That’s what made him so eager to get at my ticking little mystery box, which he never quite cracked.
“You’ve got this dark corner and you just can’t wait for someone to come in and shed some light on it, but you keep covering it up every time I turn on a flashlight”, he would tell me.
“If I could dig deep enough, I bet I could get right to that dark rotten root of yours”. The instant he stepped too close to my Bermuda triangle, I would get him on his back and lick him till he didn’t know what was what.
Under his fearsome and cumbersome chainmail armor, he had these lapses when he would let down his guard and let you sneak a peek into his holiest of holies, into the innermost cellar of his nuclear reactor.
We were lying on my living room couch. I was tending to the bandage on my arm and he was reaching out his long arm to strike the last key on the piano.
“You know, sometimes I think that this whole thing is beyond me. Life, I mean. Sometimes I feel like all my dealings with death were meant simply to keep it away. That’s my insurance policy for a life that’s so fragile, so hanging on a limb, so fragmented, a life that could be crushed at any moment. And at other times I don’t get what all the fuss is about. This little bit of life here or there – what could it possibly mean in the sum-total of things, in the history of mankind, what possible worth could this teensy tiny comma possibly have, taken against the entire history of time? Some thrills, some carnal pleasures, the occasional elation, some ups and some inevitable downs and in the end… the end”.
I knew I had to keep quiet and I kept unfurling and furling my bandage, tightening its edges, making sure it doesn’t fall off now. It’s like banding migrant birds at the Hula valley sanctuary. It’s like being Dian Fossey in the jungle with her gorillas or a National Geographic photographer trying to capture the mating of the Freyer’s Fritillary, which takes place only once a year – and if you just happened to take one superfluous breath or change lenses – the moment is gone and all is lost. Poof. The gorillas jump you or the butterflies fly off to kingdom come. The slightest movement and it all goes down the drain. A single superfluous word and a thousand hours of waiting, watching, sneaking and peeking go up in smoke. Only those capable of utmost sensitivity, like me, can take it.
He kept rhythmically striking the piano’s last E. “I am the grim reaper, Rakefet. I am the face they will remember until their dying day. I am the face of death. I’m driving around, listening to a news report about some incident in Ramallah and I just know that any minute now I’m going to get a call from the City Officer, summoning me to the preparatory meeting. It doesn’t matter what kind of day I had, it doesn’t matter if I had plans for that night. In a single moment, I am going to destroy that family’s life, forever. Everything they knew about life is going to be wiped out. Sometimes, after studying the stairwell and making sure I had the right floor and the right apartment, that I had the right victims at hand and no one else was around, I take one extra second before I knock. I grant them one more second of grace before the whole deck gets reshuffled. I get to play god”.
E, E, E, E, E.
“Which one are you more of – god or the grim reaper?”
Whoosh. Gone. The moment is dead. Sometimes I just couldn’t keep my big mouth shut.
Several months later, after me and his whoring Levite’s concubine became fast friends, she told me about that exact same moment when Oded delivered the news. Naturally, she had no idea that I knew she was talking about Oded. Naturally, she didn’t come out and tell me that she was having an affair with her bearer. In a nutshell, a bird’s eye view would show the following unfolding drama: ostensibly, neither of these women know what’s
going on between the other’s sheets, neither knows that they are sharing the same man, while half a mile away, his lawful wedded wife knows even less, but still occasionally dreams about some double D damsel straddling her husband – except that this time, yours truly knows almost everything down to a T and is cool enough about it to let the concubine have the last word, right before I tighten the noose.
We were sitting in her rented apartment in the Arab neighborhood of Wadi Joz in East Jerusalem. Her western balcony had a splendid view of the old city walls and the other families living in her building were all Arab. Three blocks down there was a group of fanatic religious settlers who, backed by the district court, started taking over apartments in order to “Jewify” the city. Still, Ruth Solomon made her home there for the exact opposite reasons. She wanted to “chummy-fy” the city, as she put it, and was on very friendly terms with all her Arab neighbors. One of the men she paid exorbitant amounts of rent, one of the women she treated holistically with crystals and other gemstones, and the children she gave English lessons in the afternoons.
You get the point – a certified loon. It was so like Oded to hook up with someone the likes of her.
So I joined her on her balcony for home-made granola cookies that she served on the oriental-tiles decorating her coffee table and for mugs of hot water with all the leaves she could pick off her fragrant potted herbs that were neatly placed along the parapet, while her Indian dress billowed in the wind.
Ruth kept moving her long hair from one side to the next – an annoying and provocative gesture in and of itself – exhaled audibly and said, “It’s so strange, you know. I mean the moment when you get the news. When they informed me about Shaul, I already knew. I knew right away. I wanted to ask the bearer if maybe he only got hurt, but I knew, he was dead and gone. At that moment, my whole world seemed to turn upside down, it was as if I had to give birth to a new world altogether, and nothing of the old world made sense anymore”.
“And it was that delivery doctor who informed you?”
She was just about to take a sip of her shrubbery juice when she froze stiff and gave me a long look.
Big faux-pas on my part. ‘That one question too many’, as crafty cross examining attorneys often say.
In a distant, lofty voice, she added, “yes, yes, just like a delivery doctor. The doctor who delivered death, who delivered the world beyond death. The one whose face will always stay engraved on your heart”.
Whore.
I won’t stop writing, I am going to keep at it, writing and writing until you understand, until even I get what I’m driving at.
Death was just a cover.
One time he went to see this bereaved father in Caesarea. I met him afterwards at a gas station and we sat in his fancy BMW.
“His mother died in the terrorist attack at the Dizengoff Center Mall ten years ago. Now he lost his kid in a training accident”.
The man was spent. He’s been up and about for the last thirty-six hours: informing the father, the long night which included preparing the body for the family to say goodbye, taking care of the obituary, appealing to the head of the IDF Manpower Directorate for the standard posthumous promotion, attending to the funeral arrangements...
“It’s funny how death lashes out at the same families again and again and again, isn’t it?” I asked, looking at the cars entering the carwash tunnel and those thick strips of plastic whipping at their backside.
“Like is drawn to like, you know”.
“Yeah, it’s as if the possibility is already there, it’s happened, the dam has broken, so it can just keep flooding again and again”.
Elgar’s Opus 85 Cello Concerto in E minor was playing in the background. It’s his most well-known concerto and its most famous recording was by Jacqueline Du Pré, who died of multiple sclerosis. That sensual and oh-so-melancholy music infused the dense air inside the car, everything was so loaded, so ready to burst that I had to open a window, despite the drizzle outside, to keep us from spontaneously combusting.
We didn’t have to say a single word. The weight of the world, so sensual and alive, so melancholy and monumental, so singular and eternal, was rippling through the sound waves in the car, when I finally dared to raise my head and look at Oded, I saw his welling eyes blink rapidly behind the lenses of his glasses, I saw his thin lips quiver and I ran the back of my hand against his cheek.
“The sister in law brought sushi to the Shiva mourning this morning. Some hoity-toity woman from Caesarea. She said that sushi was round, like eggs or Iraqi cookies, symbolizing the cycle of life – and that it was all the rage in Shivas today. Can you believe that?” He suddenly came to his senses.
Car number six went up to the tunnel’s entrance, had its antennas taken off and waited for the first blows of the whip to land on its hood.
There was no need to say anything, it was all laid out in front of us, trembling and pristine, moribund and sclerotic, so tangible and present but also horribly fragile. It had something to do with the desire to live, which takes on a different meaning when it encounters death. Almost like love between a man and a woman.
Chapter 3
The price I had to pay to reach the truth was a dear one indeed.
With the concubine, I had to listen to never ending lectures about death as a guide for life, about the here and now, about the power of the present moment, about how our mind creates our reality, about the Buddha and Zen, about the seeds of karma, about the Yemima method, about the dualistic mindset, about mental conditioning – hours on end of tacky irritating drivel – just to pluck the kernel of truth about her relationship with Oded.
With Oded, I had to offer up a pair of attentive ears to hear about the grave injustices the state inflicted on the Palestinians, about the separation wall that’s robbing them of their livelihood, about indifference and humiliation at checkpoints, about IDF operations such as “Summer Rains” and “Autumn Clouds”, that violated international treaties, about incidents at Beit Hanoun in Gaza, about disproportionate and unannounced targeted killings that take the lives of dozens of Palestinian children, about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the economic sanctions that Israel uses to break the Palestinian spirit, about the closing of the Carni and Erez crossings into Gaza – all this and more chewing my ears off, and I had to take it all in, smiling and nodding, despite my fundamental aversion to all Arabs whatsoever.
Both her hippy ranting and his leftist demagoguery were about as important to me as the melting glaciers in Iceland, but I had to stay keen and alert in order to start tracing the double, nay, triple life Oded was living. You never know where the next morsel of information might come from, revealing the entire kingdom of Narnia behind the wardrobe closet’s door.
One evening we were both stuck in our hearings at the Green House, the Jaffa military court. We decided to meet fifteen minutes later at The Fisherman restaurant in the old Jaffa port. I was just getting into my car and about to drive off when I spotted Oded chatting with the prosecution clerk, a young woman soldier with gathered chestnut hair and much too low-rise pants. This particular clerk tended to hover around him way too often and this time, when their conversation drew to a close, she also handed him a CD in a plastic sleeve.
His merry mood was all the more proof that something fishy was going on under my nose.
“So, who are you representing now?” I casually asked when we were sitting at the seaside restaurant on one of Jaffa’s cliffs, blowing cigarette smoke into his eyes.
“Don’t you read the papers, Rakefet?” He turned to look at the menu.
“I want to hear it from you, not the papers”, this time I blew my smoke away from him.
“Does the name Itay Harel ring any bells? He’s being prosecuted for firing at civilians who were waving white underwear during operation ‘Cast Lead’”.
“What are the charges?”
“Involuntary manslaughter. He killed a mother of three. Our line of defense is that he only fired afte
r being given explicit orders by his commanding officers”.
“But doesn’t that make it an unlawful order, one that he is not required to obey?” I casually demonstrated my erudition while putting out my cigarette on the pavement tile beneath me.
“You just know everything, don’t you?” He glanced at the waiter, who was setting little plates with various starters on our table, and the man quickly jumped to attention, ready to take our order. “His officers are throwing him to the dogs, claiming no such orders were given. In short, a cluster-fuck”.
“So what’s your angle?”
“You really want to know?” He thrust his fork in some fried cauliflower, brought it to his nose, sniffed at it and slid it between his no-lips.
“I have to know, I have to know everything. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” I bit down on a stuffed vine leaf, practically swallowing the whole thing.
“We asked the court for the findings of the military investigation into the woman’s death, hoping that it would corroborate our version, proving that the officers really did give the order to open fire”.
“So…” I dropped a piece of eggplant that drowned in tahini into my gullet.
“So – so the official report is classified. I was giving those prosecutors hell, we even went to the court of appeals to get our hands on those files”.
“And now, of course, you have them…”
He smiled sourly.
“No. And not only that, all the officers I called to the stand decided to hold fast to their claims. Instead of sticking up for the poor squaddie, they testified that those are not the rules of engagement in their sector and that they never gave any order which contradicted them”.
“And…” I kept pulling at the udder, hoping to milk some more information.
“And… nothing. I might have to petition the High Court of Justice, although that’s a bit of a long shot…” He cut his sea-bass down the middle and surgically removed the skeleton, placing it on the edge of his plate, just as I was squeezing a lemon over mine.